After three years of research and development, the e-Compliance project, partly funded by the FP7 programme, has shared its results at the Maritime and Transport Infrastructure Conference in Latvia. This interesting information came to us from BYM Marine & Maritime Defence News in their article, “Compliance Brings Maritime Regulations into the 21st Century.”

Routinely used in electronic passports, web certificates, online banking etc., electronic maritime certificates have broader roles in preventing fraud and significantly improving the efficiency of online transactions.

Stakeholders from the project demonstrated a prototype of the e-Compliance “Creation Tool”, a web-based text editor for the creation and querying of maritime regulations.

The tool utilizes a maritime thesaurus as a reference vocabulary which contains approximately 1,500 concepts in three languages, as well as semantic technology to extract from regulations the ‘target ship classes’ to which they apply. The business opportunities that can be realized through greater integration of Port Community Systems (PCS), and through a concrete software implementation for data exchange between the ports of Barcelona and Marseille, were highlighted.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.